Nibblins Edibles & Gifts

Situation

Nibblins Edibles & Gifts is a mall-based specialty store in Winchester, Virginia. Offering a variety of gourmet cook’s tools, nostalgic candies, gourmet fudge and an array of unique gifts, the owners suspected that their would be plenty of demand on the internet for the thousands of items they offer. Compared with the single store they operated, 300 million people on the web sounded like a nice territory!

Challenge

Having already used a local teenager to create their first web site, they knew that there would be risks in trying e-commerce with an inexperienced firm or sole proprietor web developer at a lower cost. However, with the business still being in its early years, making a large investment in e-commerce infrastructure would be difficult.

Solution

The owners received a free consultation from Brandon Wilson of Distant Horizon at the Housewares Show at McCormick Place. Finding a firm that had dozens of live e-commerce web sites was reassuring. Seeing evidence of the marketplace demand was persuasive. A few months later they called…they were ready to go. Within 45 days their web site was live and receiving orders. Distant Horizon representatives went down to Virginia and conducted a training session to ensure that all of their staff was comfortable entering new products into the web site. The owners of Nibblins loved this because idle time was inevitable in a mall environment…now everyone had something to do when no customers were in the store.

Results

By choosing Distant Horizon, Nibblins was able to avoid several risks that befall small business owners: They chose a company that could get the job done efficiently so that another holiday season would not pass them by; they chose a system that would be easy to maintain and were therefore able to delegate the maintenance of the site to their staff. Most of all, they expanded their geographic reach dramatically at a fraction of what it would cost to open another brick and mortar location.

Please visit the www.nibblins.com site and let us know what you think!